https://eagleonline.hccs.edu/courses/248517/files/60635553?wrap=1
https://flip.com/828c39a4
Please Record in this Platform: https://flip.com/828c39a4Links to an external site.
1. Simply click the pink ‘record’ button
2. Click it the backdrop button on the lower left hand side of the screen when you see your face.
3. Click ‘use screen as backdrop’ and this will allow you to record your PowerPoint presentation with your voice explaining.
English 1302
The Dinner Party
Research Sources – Presented
Controlling Your Camera – The Handheld Camera
When developing a multi-source research paper in which you build a conversation, take part in that
conversation, and assume control…the concept of the handheld camera provides a helpful analogy. Using
a handheld camera is associated with documentary filmmaking because one uses a handheld camera so that
one can react to the subject. With so much dictated by the actions of the subject, viewers perceive urgency
and necessity; they also perceive objectivity, as the filmmaker seems to have surrendered her/his authority.
With those ideas in mind, imagine a documentary film about a dinner party held in a private room. The
invitees have been selected because, as a group, they comprise an assortment of perspectives on a given
issue. They come from different walks of life and/or possess different experiences and different claims to
authority. This is, as the invitations indicate, the “ultimate dinner party,” some guests even emerging from
the grave in order to attend, and you are there to capture it and eventually to edit and present it to your
intelligent, demanding public. What may be unexpected about your role as an objective documentary
filmmaker, though, is that, at a given point, you will enter the conversation yourself. You will not put
down your camera, but you will participate, and, after a while, you will even come to dominate. You will
enter because there will be a point at which you simply will not be able to keep your mouth shut, due to the
nature (the limitations, perhaps) of the conversation. Your reason for not being able to remain silent while
maintaining complete control of the camera may be likened to your motivation for entering a debate
(known, in argument, as “the problem”).
In shooting such a documentary film, you would be working with a variety of “faces” and “voices,” you
would have to negotiate a challenging space (the room is small), and you would need to be nimble enough
to move from “face to face” (“voice to voice”) as responsively as possible. To create a richly textured
conversation—one with “active memory” (not one in which each person speaks once and is then
forgotten)—you would need to understand the particular value in each speaker, connect the conversational
thread, allow for tension and for unexpected moments of agreement and illumination as well. Once you
have begun to participate, to keep from silencing the table and losing your audience as a result, you would
need to show true engagement with and respect for the others.
PREPARE TO SHOOT:
a) choose the topic of discussion: from your brainstorm
b) create the guest list. Think about like minded people, people of opposing viewpoints, people in
between, and other kinds of people who could add significantly perhaps in unexpected ways.
“People” might be defined by type and/or by name.
c) Sketch a dinner-table diagram (think about the configuration that makes the most sense, given
the nature of this conversation) and seat the guests in relation to each other, noting the rationale
behind each choice of guest and each choice of seat, and explain the type of source each guest
personifies. For example, you might seat people of opposing viewpoints across from each other,
and both of them might be scholars. You want an electric atmosphere, and high tension. However,
you also want a conversation that will advance. (Too much tension shuts things down.) Is there
something placed in the center of the table? If so, indicate. After preparing to orient your audience
(us) to the table and the conversation, prepare to describe the filmmaker by her/his stance on the
issue and to describe her/his function. How many guests are invited? 6+
PRESENT THE FILM:
d) Go to the front of the room as a group, introduce the issue, and describe, briefly and broadly,
what’s at stake with this issue. Then describe the table, the guests, the seating, and EXPLAIN
WHY the filmmaker had to enter this conversation and her/his role in that conversation.
